China’s new leader: Let’s avoid the Soviet Union’s mistakes and keep this thing locked up

posted at 5:21 pm on February 15, 2013 by Erika Johnsen

The jingoistic, self-protecting band of plutocrats currently running China have been talking a tentative but at least slightly encouraging game lately on the possibilities for some free-enterprise and personal-freedom type reforms to the communist country’s institutions, like perhaps lightening up a bit on all of the Internet censorship and allowing their people more access to the ideas of the outside world, or maybe tackling some of the rampant corruption and cronyism that takes a mega-sized bite out of China’s GDP?

Uh huh.

Communism in any of its myriad evil forms doesn’t just work on its own, you know; it takes a lot of brainwashing and freedom-crushing to keep the dream alive, and the Chinese regime is highly touchy about their image control (hence all of those hacks into the United States’ major media outlets recently). They might be talking about maybe, kinda’, possibly, considering introducing legitimate reforms in public, but to keep their plutocracy intact, they know that cracking down on dissent is is still crucial to maintaining their totalitarian hold — and that’s what they’re talking about in private. Via the NYT:

When China’s new leader, Xi Jinping, visited the country’s south to promote himself before the public as an audacious reformer following in the footsteps of Deng Xiaoping, he had another message to deliver to Communist Party officials behind closed doors. …

“Why did the Soviet Union disintegrate? Why did the Soviet Communist Party collapse? An important reason was that their ideals and convictions wavered,” Mr. Xi said…

“Finally, all it took was one quiet word from Gorbachev to declare the dissolution of the Soviet Communist Party, and a great party was gone,” the summary quoted Mr. Xi as saying. “In the end nobody was a real man, nobody came out to resist.”

In Mr. Xi’s first three months as China’s top leader, he has gyrated between defending the party’s absolute hold on power and vowing a fundamental assault on entrenched interests of the party elite that fuel corruption. How to balance those goals presents a quandary to Mr. Xi, whose agenda could easily be undermined by rival leaders determined to protect their own bailiwicks and on guard against anything that weakens the party’s authority, insiders and analysts say.

Obviously, China has seen plenty of growth in recent years, but real liberalizing economic reforms have largely stalled out as party leaders enter panic-mode about how to salvage their own authority and wealth against the incoming tide of an increasingly global economy — and in the struggle to make China more competitive, no doubt they’ll be erring on the side of caution for some time to come.

There’s Hell hiding in those words. There’s the guy willing to spend himself, and that guy could go either way. But the guy who says that and means he’s willing to spend you — that guy is a catastrophe. You can expect tractors at some point.

I don’t think we can the Chinese Communist Party a true Communist party. The have over the last 30 years morphed into a government more like National Socialism (although not a perfect analogy). None of this is surprising because both Communist and National Socialist are cut from similar stuff and are both tyrannical. They both hate free market capitalism, both hate democratic government, both hate individual liberty, and both had governments that submitted to the military.

What scares me about China is they look like what Germany was c.1900. A nation that seemed to be on the rise technologically, militarily and economically. Germany seemed to have it all going for it, except it had a government that was rigid, was way too nationalistic (patriotism is good, but not the charge up the hill for no good reason kind) and a inept foreign policy. It led to two World Wars in the 20th century.

Lets hope China finds a way to a more free democratic style government, with the rule of law, and some concept of foreign policy other than…”Asia is ours, all ours”…”Chinese need room to grow”…”We are big country, rest of Asia are small countries”…

Sounds like the same old story from the 20th century, just different people and places.

Lets hope China finds a way to a more free democratic style government, with the rule of law, and some concept of foreign policy other than…”Asia is ours, all ours”…”Chinese need room to grow”…”We are big country, rest of Asia are small countries”…

Sounds like the same old story from the 20th century, just different people and places.

William Eaton on February 15, 2013 at 6:43 PM

With one MAJOR difference: millions of men who can’t get laid. This may not only end in war, but in bride-raids the likes of which humankind has never seen.

China isn’t as strong as it’s leaders think. It has plenty of internal tensions that have nothing to do with views on the historical success or otherwise of communism.

If we don’t pay our bills, they don’t get paid.

We understand that the Chinese leaders are fully prepared to murder their own people if they rebel and nobody knows that better than the Chinese themselves. Overall, not a wise public policy statement.